I do cryptograms at www.cryptograms.org. One that stumped me badly for a long time:
FQUTZ HGBEH KTMU NWEEH; CUUVEU GDUH KTMU GDEJ NWHKUH.
I ended up pulling a dictionary text file and created a searchable dictionary of word patterns. Not the fastest way to figure it out, but hopefully applicable to future ones. Eventually I'd love to write a program that can solve simple substitution ciphers based on the English language (and in the future plug in other language dictionaries, but step by step).
In the meantime, I keep my 100% completion rate on the month, even though it is at the cost of my solving time.
spoiler:
Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Contact - Carl Sagan (part 2)
Laughing at the idea of a presidential sneeze possibly causing nuclear war. A little scared because its probably an accurate depiction of the power the president holds.
"As der Heer was shutting the door and entering the adjacent sitting room, there was an explosive presidential sneeze. The Warrant Officer of the Day, sitting stiffly on a couch, was visibly startled. The briefcase at his feet was crammed with authorization codes for nuclear war. Der Heer calmed him with a repetitive gesture of his hand, fingers spread, palm down. The officer gave an apologetic smile.
Odds and ends: I enjoyed the fact that the president in the book is a female. Not quite reality in this day and age, but we are opening up to the idea. In other news, The National Enquirer was as notorious for flagrantly wrong but sensational headlines even in 1985. At least in some ways, the world never changes. On a more sci-fi note: One of the ideas Sagan posits about an earth defense against extraterrestrial threats: '...outposts on pluto....'. No. Outposts on pluto wouldn't be very effective at all, unless the attack happened to coincide with the random point in time where pluto was anywhere near the vicinity of their incoming trajectory. Even though we think about the orbits of the planets as circles, in this case we need to remember that the position of a planet at any given time is a point on that orbit. For a planet with such a long orbit as pluto, defensively it would probably be useless to establish a base there. It might be different if there was a planet that was always on the same side of the sun as us, but there isn't. In addition, I'm still talking about this from a 2-D perspective. The possibility of an ET coming in from some direction not on our orbital plane can't be ignored. Given all of the possibilities, it would be far better to establish defenses directly around the earth, or, given the possibility of future technology, at a few points distant enough from the solar system that we could monitor incoming threats from multiple directions and focus our resources there. Don't get me wrong, there are many other reasons we could establish a base on pluto, but defense shouldn't be one of them.
If only - Sagan discusses briefly the effect s of Trofim Lysenko's influence on Soviet molecular biology, citing it as one of the causes of the soviet's difficulties in developing the organic components of the Machine. He goes on to say that the Americans suffered a similar but more abortive attempt to stifle evolution."Fortunately for American molecular biology, the fundamentalists were never as influential in the United States as Stalin had been in the Soviet Union." If you look strictly at the issue of evolution and molecular biology, that may be true. At the same time, because it was never as widespread, it also never suffered the complete defeat that Lysenkoism suffered once it was discredited, and probably will not until the end of the era of religion. Which will be never.
The Watchmen story uses the same way of uniting the world and moving toward world peace as Contact does. We will coalesce around an external threat, drop our differences, and work together. There'll be some squabbling over who does what, but its fundamentally a united effort. We're lacking that external threat in the United States right now to unite us, so we're falling apart politically as the sides get more and more stridently opposed. For some reason a manufactured crisis can't get us moving in the right direction. Does congress have the power to bind its future self? Can God create a rock so heavy that God can't lift it?
A question I'd like to reserve for later so I can think about it - "What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?"
"As der Heer was shutting the door and entering the adjacent sitting room, there was an explosive presidential sneeze. The Warrant Officer of the Day, sitting stiffly on a couch, was visibly startled. The briefcase at his feet was crammed with authorization codes for nuclear war. Der Heer calmed him with a repetitive gesture of his hand, fingers spread, palm down. The officer gave an apologetic smile.
Odds and ends: I enjoyed the fact that the president in the book is a female. Not quite reality in this day and age, but we are opening up to the idea. In other news, The National Enquirer was as notorious for flagrantly wrong but sensational headlines even in 1985. At least in some ways, the world never changes. On a more sci-fi note: One of the ideas Sagan posits about an earth defense against extraterrestrial threats: '...outposts on pluto....'. No. Outposts on pluto wouldn't be very effective at all, unless the attack happened to coincide with the random point in time where pluto was anywhere near the vicinity of their incoming trajectory. Even though we think about the orbits of the planets as circles, in this case we need to remember that the position of a planet at any given time is a point on that orbit. For a planet with such a long orbit as pluto, defensively it would probably be useless to establish a base there. It might be different if there was a planet that was always on the same side of the sun as us, but there isn't. In addition, I'm still talking about this from a 2-D perspective. The possibility of an ET coming in from some direction not on our orbital plane can't be ignored. Given all of the possibilities, it would be far better to establish defenses directly around the earth, or, given the possibility of future technology, at a few points distant enough from the solar system that we could monitor incoming threats from multiple directions and focus our resources there. Don't get me wrong, there are many other reasons we could establish a base on pluto, but defense shouldn't be one of them.
If only - Sagan discusses briefly the effect s of Trofim Lysenko's influence on Soviet molecular biology, citing it as one of the causes of the soviet's difficulties in developing the organic components of the Machine. He goes on to say that the Americans suffered a similar but more abortive attempt to stifle evolution."Fortunately for American molecular biology, the fundamentalists were never as influential in the United States as Stalin had been in the Soviet Union." If you look strictly at the issue of evolution and molecular biology, that may be true. At the same time, because it was never as widespread, it also never suffered the complete defeat that Lysenkoism suffered once it was discredited, and probably will not until the end of the era of religion. Which will be never.
The Watchmen story uses the same way of uniting the world and moving toward world peace as Contact does. We will coalesce around an external threat, drop our differences, and work together. There'll be some squabbling over who does what, but its fundamentally a united effort. We're lacking that external threat in the United States right now to unite us, so we're falling apart politically as the sides get more and more stridently opposed. For some reason a manufactured crisis can't get us moving in the right direction. Does congress have the power to bind its future self? Can God create a rock so heavy that God can't lift it?
A question I'd like to reserve for later so I can think about it - "What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?"
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Contact, Carl Sagan (discussion 1)
Yesterday, we took a walk around the lake to look at Christmas lights. Thinking back, it seems like a tragedy that I cannot remember once looking up at the night sky and enjoying the stars and constellations. Contact is reminding me how much less wonder and awe I have in my life now than I used to. It is a story of a precocious scientist (Ellie) who, from her birth, exhibited an interest in science and wonder and an aptitude for electronics. She gets into radio astronomy and eventually discovers an encrypted message from extraterrestrial life (I'm assuming because I haven't gotten that far in the book yet) .
Many years ago, I watched the movie 'Entrapment'. It came out prior to the new millenium, and took place in the future, on the eve of the new year and millenium. I can remember thinking as I walked out of the theater the wonder that the events in the movie hadn't happened yet. A few weeks/months later, I don't recall how long, I can recall thinking back on the movie and realized that the time period had passed. Through no fault of its own, the entire perspective of the movie had shifted and made it into a fictional history instead of a future potentiality.
Contact was written in 1985 to take place in 1999, and I read it now in 2012. A book written in the past about a future that is now also in the past. I read it now as past history that never happened, a fiction, a tragedy of the real world coalescing into one reality that isn't represented by the story. I wish it had been true (Keep in mind, I am only ten chapters in out of twenty-four, so this opinion may be subject to change). It is true that humans need awe, and such events would have been awing. At the same time, some of the future brought about by the Message did actually occur, without the Message intervention. The book was written at the end of the cold war, and predicted a world where the Message would force the nations of the world to work together even pushing aside the bitter rivalry between the Russians and Americans. The book is written from the perspective of a scientist who cares less about the political background of her fellow scientists than their abilities, but it also reasonably accurately portrays a more modern sense of the tentative acceptance we have of the Russian place in modern society rather than a more contemporary (for that time at least) deprecation of everything that was against the US in the cold war.
Chapter ten contains a discussion about the relationship between science and religion, including a sermon by a rabble-rouser exhorting people to not believe the lies fed to the populace by scientists and an exchange between Ellie and two prominent fundamentalist preachers of slightly different flavors. Either the relationship between fundamentalist religion and science has not changed at all in the last 30 years or Sagan very accurately predicted what relations would be in the future. I suspect the former. Although the discussion is set up to be an even-handed discussion of science and religion, it turns into (was from the start) a defense of science from the religious. I feel that this is an inevitable result of a discussion between two sides where one side is sure they are always right, and the other side is sure that they are never quite right but definitely getting closer. You cannot have an open discussion when one half of the conversation is closed-minded. Mind you, there are plenty of scientists who dogmatically defend the principles of science without necessarily believing in them, or even recognizing the hypocrisy of some of their positions. Too often we have scientists who create a hypothesis then create an experiment to prove it. In this book at least we do not have deal with that right now. Ellie is the ideal scientist - open to questioning her own beliefs, even about science. It is a little bit alien to me - human nature, including mine, is to find and see patterns whether they exist or not.
Contact touches on the gendered-ness of the scientific community. As a female with a brain, Ellie has to fight to be recognized by the majority of her male colleagues, even as she is better at what she does many of them. It is not so overt now, graduating in 2010, as it was then. It is still not gone. In college I wore clothes that didn't flatter my figure, for the double reason of a) it wasn't worth the cost, bother, and annoying attention that the clothes won me for my body, and b) the people who did notice me noticed me for what I could do. At the same time, I personally am biased against my own sex. It took about the same amount of time for me to convince myself that a female professor knew what she was doing as it did for me to convince myself that a male professor didn't know what he was doing. The initial hypothesis is in a different direction, depending on the gender. In addition, in my memory, I lump all the female pre-med BME's into one non-engineering group, while I remember specific pre-med males as being non-engineers. This might be a consequence of the fact that while all the female pre-meds where memorization machines, there were at least two male pre-meds that were incredibly good engineers, and in my opinion will be truly wasted in a medical field.
On a personal note, this book is reminding me why I wanted to go into research in the first place - the awe and splendor, the serendipity of discovery. Probably fortunately, I remember also that I do not find myself particularly suited to the tedium of research with no reason to hope for success other than that what I'm looking for hasn't been disproven yet. Several years in the lab have decisively pointed to a different direction as much more suitable, and as awesome as it is to dream of the next big discovery, I think I'm much happier where I am. Maybe a few more Sagan books will get me back into a lab.
Many years ago, I watched the movie 'Entrapment'. It came out prior to the new millenium, and took place in the future, on the eve of the new year and millenium. I can remember thinking as I walked out of the theater the wonder that the events in the movie hadn't happened yet. A few weeks/months later, I don't recall how long, I can recall thinking back on the movie and realized that the time period had passed. Through no fault of its own, the entire perspective of the movie had shifted and made it into a fictional history instead of a future potentiality.
Contact was written in 1985 to take place in 1999, and I read it now in 2012. A book written in the past about a future that is now also in the past. I read it now as past history that never happened, a fiction, a tragedy of the real world coalescing into one reality that isn't represented by the story. I wish it had been true (Keep in mind, I am only ten chapters in out of twenty-four, so this opinion may be subject to change). It is true that humans need awe, and such events would have been awing. At the same time, some of the future brought about by the Message did actually occur, without the Message intervention. The book was written at the end of the cold war, and predicted a world where the Message would force the nations of the world to work together even pushing aside the bitter rivalry between the Russians and Americans. The book is written from the perspective of a scientist who cares less about the political background of her fellow scientists than their abilities, but it also reasonably accurately portrays a more modern sense of the tentative acceptance we have of the Russian place in modern society rather than a more contemporary (for that time at least) deprecation of everything that was against the US in the cold war.
Chapter ten contains a discussion about the relationship between science and religion, including a sermon by a rabble-rouser exhorting people to not believe the lies fed to the populace by scientists and an exchange between Ellie and two prominent fundamentalist preachers of slightly different flavors. Either the relationship between fundamentalist religion and science has not changed at all in the last 30 years or Sagan very accurately predicted what relations would be in the future. I suspect the former. Although the discussion is set up to be an even-handed discussion of science and religion, it turns into (was from the start) a defense of science from the religious. I feel that this is an inevitable result of a discussion between two sides where one side is sure they are always right, and the other side is sure that they are never quite right but definitely getting closer. You cannot have an open discussion when one half of the conversation is closed-minded. Mind you, there are plenty of scientists who dogmatically defend the principles of science without necessarily believing in them, or even recognizing the hypocrisy of some of their positions. Too often we have scientists who create a hypothesis then create an experiment to prove it. In this book at least we do not have deal with that right now. Ellie is the ideal scientist - open to questioning her own beliefs, even about science. It is a little bit alien to me - human nature, including mine, is to find and see patterns whether they exist or not.
Contact touches on the gendered-ness of the scientific community. As a female with a brain, Ellie has to fight to be recognized by the majority of her male colleagues, even as she is better at what she does many of them. It is not so overt now, graduating in 2010, as it was then. It is still not gone. In college I wore clothes that didn't flatter my figure, for the double reason of a) it wasn't worth the cost, bother, and annoying attention that the clothes won me for my body, and b) the people who did notice me noticed me for what I could do. At the same time, I personally am biased against my own sex. It took about the same amount of time for me to convince myself that a female professor knew what she was doing as it did for me to convince myself that a male professor didn't know what he was doing. The initial hypothesis is in a different direction, depending on the gender. In addition, in my memory, I lump all the female pre-med BME's into one non-engineering group, while I remember specific pre-med males as being non-engineers. This might be a consequence of the fact that while all the female pre-meds where memorization machines, there were at least two male pre-meds that were incredibly good engineers, and in my opinion will be truly wasted in a medical field.
On a personal note, this book is reminding me why I wanted to go into research in the first place - the awe and splendor, the serendipity of discovery. Probably fortunately, I remember also that I do not find myself particularly suited to the tedium of research with no reason to hope for success other than that what I'm looking for hasn't been disproven yet. Several years in the lab have decisively pointed to a different direction as much more suitable, and as awesome as it is to dream of the next big discovery, I think I'm much happier where I am. Maybe a few more Sagan books will get me back into a lab.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Shakespeare: King Lear
I've been on a bit of a Shakespeare kick, after buying a Complete Works edition. This is encompassed in two ways - reading the play, and watching various versions of it in movie/recordings.
To start off, if you are unfamiliar with Shakespearean English, my recommendation is to begin with a movie that will give you both the plot and the English, rather than trying to read it. I typically read first, but I have also spent a significant amount of time reading works from Beowulf/Chaucer on up, so at this point I do have enough experience with it. A lot of the language is still reminiscent of 2nd or 3rd meanings of words today, but many people I've talked to have trouble with this because we aren't exposed to those meanings nearly as much nowadays. For me, the social traditions are where I need more assistance from commentary.
I will start with King Lear, so that I don't have to end with it. It is a bleak, bleak tragedy. Don't read it unless you're in the mood to feel depressed. An aging King Lear has three daughters and no heir, and wants to test his daughters' love for him. His favorite is the youngest, Cordelia. In a scene reminiscent of the fairy tale 'Water and Salt', the youngest daughter is construed to not love her father and thrown into exile in France.The King attempts to retire and stay with his two remaining daughters, but finds that he has lost all respect and is expected to become a nobody. He starts to go mad and his two elder daughters take over the kingdom, while his youngest daughter and the French king to come rescue him from the two eldest. The armies meet, and I won't tell you precisely what happens but this is one of Shakespeare's tragedies. A bleak one.
One of the themes this play explores is family ties and the effect of age. In that day and age, when you became too old to be productive you had no choice but to hope that someone of your kin would be kind enough to support you, knowing full well that they would be in the same position some day and hope that their own children would support them. Lear had a high enough opinion of his position that he felt it would be degrading to downsize his court, and his elder daughters thought him a fool of no worth and would not support his court. Once they had their inheritance, they cared nothing for the man who gave it to them. In this case, it is interesting also that Lear's retirement woes come about from the way he decided to retire. It is his own fault that he finds himself in that situation, which heightens the tragedy.
It is worth noting that this piece was written in England, a decisively western culture. In modern times, there appears to be a huge dichotomy between Eastern and Western cultures as regards aging and support. Western tradition views it as the government's responsibility to ensure that the aging parents are taken care of, through Welfare, Social Security, or whichever program is in place in any given country. Culturally, children are not required to take care of their parents, and it is viewed as a failure of the aging if they do not have enough money to live on without being parasites. In Tussian culture, there is [was?] no such expectation of government, in that the children know they will take care of their parents when the time comes. Lenora Greenbaum Ucko: Perceptions of Aging East and West: Soviet Refugees see two worlds. http://www.storieswork.org/aging_east_and_west.pdf. Something to add to my reading list is "Aging in East and West: Families, States, and the Elderly" by Bengtson, Kim, Myers, Eun.
There are two movie versions of this that I have seen. The first portrays Laurence Olivier as King Lear; the second James Earl Jones. Laurence Olivier is a master. There is nothing to say beyond that. I was incredibly depressed by his performance, which means that he carried it off and had precisely the desired effect. To see King Lear as a doddering old man, running mad from misuse and memories of past grandeur, abused and finally dying in delusion, serve to strip away any remaining gloss from the perception of human character. He is a tragedy by himself, a frail old man who is dying but refuses to see it. The second, with James Earl Jones, is less bleak than stark. Where Olivier's version has a gritty reality, Jones' version has more contrasting sets, with lighting/black/white contrast serve to show how desolate this madness really is. Olivier's Lear is more subtle, Jones' more overtly emtional. It's still a depressing play.
To start off, if you are unfamiliar with Shakespearean English, my recommendation is to begin with a movie that will give you both the plot and the English, rather than trying to read it. I typically read first, but I have also spent a significant amount of time reading works from Beowulf/Chaucer on up, so at this point I do have enough experience with it. A lot of the language is still reminiscent of 2nd or 3rd meanings of words today, but many people I've talked to have trouble with this because we aren't exposed to those meanings nearly as much nowadays. For me, the social traditions are where I need more assistance from commentary.
I will start with King Lear, so that I don't have to end with it. It is a bleak, bleak tragedy. Don't read it unless you're in the mood to feel depressed. An aging King Lear has three daughters and no heir, and wants to test his daughters' love for him. His favorite is the youngest, Cordelia. In a scene reminiscent of the fairy tale 'Water and Salt', the youngest daughter is construed to not love her father and thrown into exile in France.The King attempts to retire and stay with his two remaining daughters, but finds that he has lost all respect and is expected to become a nobody. He starts to go mad and his two elder daughters take over the kingdom, while his youngest daughter and the French king to come rescue him from the two eldest. The armies meet, and I won't tell you precisely what happens but this is one of Shakespeare's tragedies. A bleak one.
One of the themes this play explores is family ties and the effect of age. In that day and age, when you became too old to be productive you had no choice but to hope that someone of your kin would be kind enough to support you, knowing full well that they would be in the same position some day and hope that their own children would support them. Lear had a high enough opinion of his position that he felt it would be degrading to downsize his court, and his elder daughters thought him a fool of no worth and would not support his court. Once they had their inheritance, they cared nothing for the man who gave it to them. In this case, it is interesting also that Lear's retirement woes come about from the way he decided to retire. It is his own fault that he finds himself in that situation, which heightens the tragedy.
It is worth noting that this piece was written in England, a decisively western culture. In modern times, there appears to be a huge dichotomy between Eastern and Western cultures as regards aging and support. Western tradition views it as the government's responsibility to ensure that the aging parents are taken care of, through Welfare, Social Security, or whichever program is in place in any given country. Culturally, children are not required to take care of their parents, and it is viewed as a failure of the aging if they do not have enough money to live on without being parasites. In Tussian culture, there is [was?] no such expectation of government, in that the children know they will take care of their parents when the time comes. Lenora Greenbaum Ucko: Perceptions of Aging East and West: Soviet Refugees see two worlds. http://www.storieswork.org/aging_east_and_west.pdf. Something to add to my reading list is "Aging in East and West: Families, States, and the Elderly" by Bengtson, Kim, Myers, Eun.
There are two movie versions of this that I have seen. The first portrays Laurence Olivier as King Lear; the second James Earl Jones. Laurence Olivier is a master. There is nothing to say beyond that. I was incredibly depressed by his performance, which means that he carried it off and had precisely the desired effect. To see King Lear as a doddering old man, running mad from misuse and memories of past grandeur, abused and finally dying in delusion, serve to strip away any remaining gloss from the perception of human character. He is a tragedy by himself, a frail old man who is dying but refuses to see it. The second, with James Earl Jones, is less bleak than stark. Where Olivier's version has a gritty reality, Jones' version has more contrasting sets, with lighting/black/white contrast serve to show how desolate this madness really is. Olivier's Lear is more subtle, Jones' more overtly emtional. It's still a depressing play.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
John Donne - Assorted poetry
One of the things I've been slowly working through is the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I made it to John Donne's poetry before slowing down, which is not bad, but then I took a two-year hiatus. I am now returning.
One of the most interesting aspects of reading a survey of English literature in chronological order is that you can see the development of the language. A lot of the material included in Norton is in verse, and you can see the shifts in pronunciation over time. A long time ago, everything that ended in -ies rhymed. Not so nowadays - as one example, compare the pronunciation of "lies" and "duties".
On the poetry of John Donne specifically - he is an amazingly gifted poet. He is also a very dirty one. The amount of punning or double meanings in his poetry is obscene, as is the punning itself often. I learned something new today - in the year 1600, "to die" was also slang for having an orgasm. "To Have" contained the same slang connotation as it does today. There are also many double-meanings including such language as 'pregnant' or 'barren'. At some point I will go ahead and augment this post with actual samples. In the meantime, go read, "To His Mistress" and "The Flea".
One of the most interesting aspects of reading a survey of English literature in chronological order is that you can see the development of the language. A lot of the material included in Norton is in verse, and you can see the shifts in pronunciation over time. A long time ago, everything that ended in -ies rhymed. Not so nowadays - as one example, compare the pronunciation of "lies" and "duties".
On the poetry of John Donne specifically - he is an amazingly gifted poet. He is also a very dirty one. The amount of punning or double meanings in his poetry is obscene, as is the punning itself often. I learned something new today - in the year 1600, "to die" was also slang for having an orgasm. "To Have" contained the same slang connotation as it does today. There are also many double-meanings including such language as 'pregnant' or 'barren'. At some point I will go ahead and augment this post with actual samples. In the meantime, go read, "To His Mistress" and "The Flea".
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Short Stories: "The Storm" and "Robbed"
I happened upon a radio station that had story time, and heard these two colorful pieces. The first is "The Storm" by Jules Verne, and the second is "Robbed" by Ellen Currie. Fair warning that there is plot information throughout this post. Maybe you should go dig up a copy and read it first. Then write your own untainted review. Then come back and read and compare with mine.
The conclusion I've reached from short stories is that they are little bits of spice to life - quick vignettes that give color, perspective, and humor. They don't take a massive time commitment to read, they can force you to think about life. All in all, worth seeking out and reading.
Typically, Jules Verne is scientific. Think "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Around the World in 80 Days". It is a unique style, but definitely scientific. While still stylistically Jules Verne, "The Storm" could otherwise have been written by Edgar Allen Poe; delving into the realms of the mysterious and unexplainable. It is also reminiscent of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, insofar as the main character is an old crotchety man who has not yet learnt to care for other people.
Here, the main character is a doctor who charges up front for care, and won't help unless he is paid, even if someone is dying. In the middle of a storm, a dying man's daughter, wife, and mother in succession come to knock on his door, and eventually they sell the house to have enough money to tempt him to come. When he eventually begrudgingly arrives, he discovers the house is his own, and he himself is the patient. Try as he might, he waited too long and cannot save himself. The townsfolk discover him dead the next morning. The proverbial takeaways here are that money isn't everything and that you should do what you can to help your fellow man.
'Robbed' was a fun story. It looks at the mental aspects of two people put into an unusual situation, and how they react differently. A jewelry store owner is being held up, and a regular customer of hers walks in. Everything we find out about the customer we find out through the store owner having a conversation with the robber. Apparently the customer always loses her wedding ring, and has to get a new one custom-engraved with "X and Y" forever. The irony of this appears to be lost on the woman, whose marriage seems to be a bit tumultuous and whose rings are definitely not for forever. The author lampoons the customer by having her try to act macho. When that doesn't work the stereotypical 'damsel in distress' only to have all of her acts shot down by the store owner.
The store owner takes the whole affair quite calmly and has an amusing outlook on life, considering that, with the robbery, she comes out ahead in multiple ways. She didn't lose as much money as she would have lost in insurance, she doesn't have to deal with the obnoxious woman anymore. She knows someone will eventually come in and find them, so she doesn't bother with the cliches like screaming that probably won't help but will definitely make the situation more odious. Aside from her willingness to insult someone (at least she does it to her face), we should all take things in stride like that.
The conclusion I've reached from short stories is that they are little bits of spice to life - quick vignettes that give color, perspective, and humor. They don't take a massive time commitment to read, they can force you to think about life. All in all, worth seeking out and reading.
Typically, Jules Verne is scientific. Think "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Around the World in 80 Days". It is a unique style, but definitely scientific. While still stylistically Jules Verne, "The Storm" could otherwise have been written by Edgar Allen Poe; delving into the realms of the mysterious and unexplainable. It is also reminiscent of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, insofar as the main character is an old crotchety man who has not yet learnt to care for other people.
Here, the main character is a doctor who charges up front for care, and won't help unless he is paid, even if someone is dying. In the middle of a storm, a dying man's daughter, wife, and mother in succession come to knock on his door, and eventually they sell the house to have enough money to tempt him to come. When he eventually begrudgingly arrives, he discovers the house is his own, and he himself is the patient. Try as he might, he waited too long and cannot save himself. The townsfolk discover him dead the next morning. The proverbial takeaways here are that money isn't everything and that you should do what you can to help your fellow man.
'Robbed' was a fun story. It looks at the mental aspects of two people put into an unusual situation, and how they react differently. A jewelry store owner is being held up, and a regular customer of hers walks in. Everything we find out about the customer we find out through the store owner having a conversation with the robber. Apparently the customer always loses her wedding ring, and has to get a new one custom-engraved with "X and Y" forever. The irony of this appears to be lost on the woman, whose marriage seems to be a bit tumultuous and whose rings are definitely not for forever. The author lampoons the customer by having her try to act macho. When that doesn't work the stereotypical 'damsel in distress' only to have all of her acts shot down by the store owner.
The store owner takes the whole affair quite calmly and has an amusing outlook on life, considering that, with the robbery, she comes out ahead in multiple ways. She didn't lose as much money as she would have lost in insurance, she doesn't have to deal with the obnoxious woman anymore. She knows someone will eventually come in and find them, so she doesn't bother with the cliches like screaming that probably won't help but will definitely make the situation more odious. Aside from her willingness to insult someone (at least she does it to her face), we should all take things in stride like that.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Part 1)
I am attempting that Mount Everest of literature – Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. I am at no stopping point; I have merely reached a point where it is necessary to jot down some thoughts and empty my head before the reading may continue. My apologies for the grandiloquence of style – I have nothing to plead but that Melville is infectious.
A massive stylistic difference stands out to me between this book and more modern literature. We as modern readers have come to expect an action-based plot – where the actions that we are reading about are interesting for their uniqueness and that pertinence to the story which makes that story unique. So far, this has been the narrative of a rather ordinary sea voyage. Melville implies that the colorfulness of the characters are not atypical of the time and the sailing ships – the religiously unbending Quakers who nevertheless reconcile their zeal for the next world with the practicality required to live in this one; the three barbaric harpooners who are genteel and a good sort of fellow (barbarism only implies that they are not Christian, not that they are ‘barbaric’ in the sense of the word as we use it today.) The other sailors seem no more nor less noteworthy than any of their unmentioned counterparts ought to be, and the hiring Captains on shore implied that Harpooners were usually an odd lot. The weather was extremely cold in New England before the ship left port – who ever heard of such a thing? Oh, everyone? Nevermind, I guess that’s normal too. In short, almost a third of the way through the book, and it has been a narrative of entirely mundane events. No wonder many modern readers have trouble getting through this story – if you are not alive to learning more about the mundanities of whaling and cetology than you maybe thought possible, you’re going to close the book and leave it off well before ‘anything happens’ by your definition of the word.
Another stylistic difference is the use of allusions and epithets to color the narrative. He has shown me truly how badly versed in history, mythology, folklore, and pretty much everything else I truly am. This is another turnoff for many modern readers – we have lost so many of our classical and historical allusions that the reading is either incomprehensible or ceaselessly bogged down in searching for references. What would in the past have been a one or two-word descriptor that allows the author to paint a vivid picture is now a colorful liability. How many people trying to read the story now outside of England know who Nelson was, and why he might have a statue in Trafalgar square, and how that might be relevant to a sea-faring novel? How many of you know Trafalgar square? Removing the rhetoricity from this question for a moment, did you as a reader of this discussion know it? If not, have you looked it up yet? Are you going to be incredibly lazy and wait for me to tell you that he was an Admiral of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars known for brilliant tactics and strategy, and that he was fatally shot during his victory at the battle of Trafalgar? If you don’t know what the battle of Trafalgar is and won’t look that up either, I despair for you.
It is of note that a great many highly religious people in these United States would do well to read Moby Dick. We are one-hundred-sixty years after it is published, yet Melville is able to more clearly write about religious tolerance than many people who profess to have learnt something in the intervening years.
A massive stylistic difference stands out to me between this book and more modern literature. We as modern readers have come to expect an action-based plot – where the actions that we are reading about are interesting for their uniqueness and that pertinence to the story which makes that story unique. So far, this has been the narrative of a rather ordinary sea voyage. Melville implies that the colorfulness of the characters are not atypical of the time and the sailing ships – the religiously unbending Quakers who nevertheless reconcile their zeal for the next world with the practicality required to live in this one; the three barbaric harpooners who are genteel and a good sort of fellow (barbarism only implies that they are not Christian, not that they are ‘barbaric’ in the sense of the word as we use it today.) The other sailors seem no more nor less noteworthy than any of their unmentioned counterparts ought to be, and the hiring Captains on shore implied that Harpooners were usually an odd lot. The weather was extremely cold in New England before the ship left port – who ever heard of such a thing? Oh, everyone? Nevermind, I guess that’s normal too. In short, almost a third of the way through the book, and it has been a narrative of entirely mundane events. No wonder many modern readers have trouble getting through this story – if you are not alive to learning more about the mundanities of whaling and cetology than you maybe thought possible, you’re going to close the book and leave it off well before ‘anything happens’ by your definition of the word.
Another stylistic difference is the use of allusions and epithets to color the narrative. He has shown me truly how badly versed in history, mythology, folklore, and pretty much everything else I truly am. This is another turnoff for many modern readers – we have lost so many of our classical and historical allusions that the reading is either incomprehensible or ceaselessly bogged down in searching for references. What would in the past have been a one or two-word descriptor that allows the author to paint a vivid picture is now a colorful liability. How many people trying to read the story now outside of England know who Nelson was, and why he might have a statue in Trafalgar square, and how that might be relevant to a sea-faring novel? How many of you know Trafalgar square? Removing the rhetoricity from this question for a moment, did you as a reader of this discussion know it? If not, have you looked it up yet? Are you going to be incredibly lazy and wait for me to tell you that he was an Admiral of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars known for brilliant tactics and strategy, and that he was fatally shot during his victory at the battle of Trafalgar? If you don’t know what the battle of Trafalgar is and won’t look that up either, I despair for you.
It is of note that a great many highly religious people in these United States would do well to read Moby Dick. We are one-hundred-sixty years after it is published, yet Melville is able to more clearly write about religious tolerance than many people who profess to have learnt something in the intervening years.
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